


keep on going when it's all falling apart

by steepedinwords



Series: JATP Appreciation Week 2020 [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Death, Gen, Grieving, JATP Appreciation Week 2020, POV Ray, Ray Molina is a Good Dad, how awful that first year must have been
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27350308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steepedinwords/pseuds/steepedinwords
Summary: Day 1: Write in your favourite character's POV."None of them wants to be alone that first night, surrounded by the echoes of Rose’s voice and Rose’s love woven all through the house in brightly-coloured threads of memories. Carlos crawls into Ray’s lap on the couch and falls asleep, and Julie cries herself to sleep on his shoulder, and Ray wakes up at sunrise with an aching neck to find both of his kids still curled in towards him as if he might know how to fix things, as if he’s now the centre of gravity - when it’s always been Rose, Rose, Rose."He doesn’t have the first idea how to live life without her, but there’s not another option."A look at the year after Rose died.Written forJulie and the Phantoms Appreciation Week 2020.
Relationships: Julie Molina's Mother/Ray Molina
Series: JATP Appreciation Week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1997389
Comments: 27
Kudos: 51
Collections: JATP Appreciation Week





	keep on going when it's all falling apart

**Author's Note:**

> Ray Molina is one of my favourite characters, so I thought I'd give him some appreciation here. He's just such a wonderful dad, and a kind person.
> 
> Writing this kind of wrecked me? Thinking about losing a partner is rough. 
> 
> CW: grief, canonical character death, non-graphic mention of illness and depression.

There are times that Ray Molina feels utterly inadequate without Rose.

He wasn’t prepared to lose her. He’d watched her fade and her strength slip away, until he was carrying her around the house, to the car to get to her doctor’s appointments, to the studio where she was stubbornly working on one final song. Until the day they said she couldn’t come home, till the day the light went out of her eyes. Ray wasn’t ready. He doesn’t think he ever could have been. Losing Rose feels too big to comprehend.

But Julie and Carlos lost her too, and he needs to be there for them. The three of them go home to a house without Rose, but in the silence, there are little traces of her everywhere. Books and medications she won’t need in the room they’d set up for her downstairs, where Ray had slept curled around her in the guest bed for the last few months. The colourful array of headscarves Julie had sewed when Rose’s curls began falling out. The bracelets around all of their wrists that they’d all made for each other, sunny Saturday afternoons after Rose’s appointments spent in the living room with beads and colourful thread, music playing and Rose laughing with the kids as if everything was fine, while Ray wove blue and white thread together around a dahlia bead for Julie and watched the three of them with an aching heart.

None of them wants to be alone that first night, surrounded by the echoes of Rose’s voice and Rose’s love woven all through the house in brightly-coloured threads of memories. Carlos crawls into Ray’s lap on the couch and falls asleep, and Julie cries herself to sleep on his shoulder, and Ray wakes up at sunrise with an aching neck to find both of his kids still curled in towards him as if he might know how to fix things, as if he’s now the centre of gravity - when it’s always been Rose, Rose, Rose.

He doesn’t have the first idea how to live life without her, but there’s not another option.

He keeps finding the little notes she liked to leave for them, coloured sticky notes tucked away in drawers and cabinets, behind the bathroom mirror in their room, inside a book she’d been reading.  _ I love you. Stay strong. You’re so good. Te amo. You can do this. I love you, I love you, I love you. _ And every time he turns a corner or comes down the stairs, he half-expects to find her there, smiling back at him. Sometimes he swears he could hear her humming.

Julie goes withdrawn and quiet in those first few days. Carlos keeps crying, and Ray doesn’t know how to comfort either of them, just holds them for hours, his own tears dripping into their hair. He goes to turn the light off in the kids’ bathroom upstairs one night and finds Carlos’ bracelets lying beside the sink, strings cut, a pair of scissors lying beside them. He gathers up every bead he can find and tucks the pieces of bracelet into a box for when Carlos might want them again.

He goes back to sleeping in his and Rose’s old room upstairs, because the guest room reminds him of late-night whispered conversations and helping Rose take meds she could barely keep down, and there’s no reason to stay down there any more. Their bed is too big for just him. He keeps rolling over in the middle of the night and reaching for someone who isn’t there any more. Rose’s photo sits on his bedside table, and he talks to it when he can’t sleep, closing his eyes sometimes and imagining her sitting beside him, holding his hand.

**_and it’s one..._ **

They all fall apart, those first few weeks.

It’s mid-November, so there’s school. Julie and Carlos were excused for a couple of weeks, but they have to go back eventually. They’re really struggling. Carlos has mood swings sometimes, and his usual interest in everything, in stories and science and discovery, has subsided. He loses himself in hours of kids’ cartoons instead, watching  _ She-Ra _ and  _ Adventure Time _ when he should be doing homework, and Ray rarely has the heart to try and make him do anything else. And Julie - it hurts to see the shutters go up over his daughter’s bright soul. She’s so tired, all the time. The spark she’s always had, her delight in performing, her joy in music, in creativity - it’s just been snuffed out. They lost Rose’s music and Julie’s on the same day. The weight of her sadness is so heavy on all of them, and Ray doesn’t know what to do.

He remembers about the plants in the studio with a sickening jolt, a week after the funeral. Some of them are dead, and he feels so guilty about it that he cries while throwing them out. He doesn’t have the first idea how to take care of the surviving plants - they had been Rose’s babies, and when she got too sick to look after them, Julie had taken over. The garden was always more Ray’s thing. But Julie hasn’t been near the studio since before the last hospital trip. 

He ends up watering them all, hoping he hasn’t drowned any, and that night, he makes a list, googling every plant carefully, and puts a little label on every pot so he’ll remember. It’s hard, going back into the room where Rose had made so much music, but. Someone has to do it. He can’t let more of Rose’s plants die.

Victoria helps, so much. She pours her own grief into care for her sister’s family, into food brought over and stuffed into their fridge several times a week, even though no one really seems hungry. She offers to do the grocery shopping when Ray is too exhausted from a day dealing with clients who don’t know or care about his grief to leave the house again, and he’s so grateful for her.

Sometimes the food she makes is one of Rose’s favourites, arroz con pollo or empanadillas, and that hurts, but they smile at Victoria and eat it anyway, even though it tastes like ashes in Ray’s mouth. Sometimes it’s frustrating, that she expresses her love through food like this - Ray knows she means well, and it’s probably good for them to have a change from spaghetti and reheated garlic bread or canned tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. But sometimes it feels a little like judgement of his parenting, even though he knows Victoria would never mean it that way.

But the food does help, and it stops hurting so much after a while, because it’s shifted from being a reminder of things Rose had loved, to being a way to remember her. 

They keep setting a place for Rose at the table. They just forgot, the first time. It had been a few awful days of haphazard meals, eating reheated casserole brought by people from church, no one really hungry but Ray making sure they eat something anyway. Not at the table, though - they’ve been sitting curled together in a little group in front of the TV, trying for a distraction, or sitting on the bar stools at the island. Sometimes when Julie can’t get out of bed, Ray and Carlos sit on the floor in her room with their plates to keep her company.

But this first time, Victoria had come over, and they were all getting ready to eat together at the table, and Carlos absently put out a place setting for Rose. Julie had come over with five glasses stacked precariously in her hands, and Ray had been about to ask her to be more careful when he realised the number of glasses. Five glasses, five place settings. Victoria doesn’t say anything as they sit down at the table, just holds one of Ray’s hands and one of Julie’s, and Julie holds out her hand to empty air, as if someone might hold hers back. Carlos does the same, and Victoria looks like she’s about to burst into tears.

His heart shatters again every time something like this happens. Grief is new territory, and there’s new fault lines appearing in places he doesn’t expect, but he has to stay strong for his family. And if that means holding the shards of his heart inside his ribcage so they don’t cut anyone else, well.

If a place setting will help, he’s not going to make them stop setting one.

**_two…_ **

The first Christmas without Rose is incredibly hard.

They start seeing a therapist after that. The sessions with Dr. Turner seem to help Carlos a lot, and Ray starts finding his way forward too, learning how to process. It’s not like he’s ever lacked a reason to keep going. He’s had his family. But the therapy helps him realise that he needs to keep going for himself too, not just to keep Julie and Carlos going. There’s still times when grief catches raw and thick in his throat - it happens most days, to be honest - but it feels like maybe he’s starting to heal, a little bit.

Julie hates the therapy sessions at first. She doesn’t want to talk about any of it, but she tries, because she’s brave and she trusts him. Ray just wishes it was better for her, that it would help her the way it’s helping him and Carlos. She gets so exhausted that sometimes she falls asleep in the car on the way home after a session. She doesn’t seem interested in anything she used to be, and her teachers tell Ray that she’s struggling.

There’s a failed English test, and Ray asks Julie about it, and she gives a tiny shrug.

“What’s the point?” she says, sounding close to tears, and honestly, some days he has a hard time answering that too. 

“Mom wouldn’t want you to give up,” he tries, and knows immediately it’s the wrong thing to say. Julie’s eyes fill with tears, and she runs away. He finds her an hour later in the studio with the plants. It should feel like a breakthrough - it’s the first time she’s gone in there since Rose’s death. But it doesn’t. Julie is sitting on the floor in the plant room in the late evening light, back turned to the piano. She’s staring at the green and red pattern on a coleus leaf. Ray stands awkwardly, not knowing what to say, until Julie sniffles, and then he’s on his knees beside her, hugging her tight, and Julie is hugging back.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” he mutters into her curls. “I just… I’m worried for you, mija. I want you…” to heal, not just survive. But he can’t say that. “I want you to be happy. But I’m sorry for pushing. You’ve got time.”

She doesn’t look up, but she leans into him, holds up her hand with her forefinger outstretched, and Ray links his own with it. That’s an okay answer for now.

Julie doesn’t go in the studio again.

They keep going to Dr. Turner. Ray keeps hoping it will help, though he’s thinking about maybe trying a different therapist, but they’ve done so much work with Dr. Turner already. It does seem to help, eventually. Julie seems more stable, she has more energy, she starts to care about her grades again. She even does art again.. Flynn comes over almost every day, and sometimes Ray hears them laughing together in Julie’s room, and the sound makes his heart lift a little bit.

Carlos bounces back more quickly, but Ray can still pinpoint the moments that his son forgets for a moment that Rose is gone, or when something reminds him, and every time Ray’s heart aches for his son. But Carlos has joined the soccer team, and he’s spending more time with his school friends again, and watching the science shows he used to love. He goes over to Victoria’s and helps her bake cookies, and it seems like he’s doing better.

Ray does his best to spend time with both of them. He needs to make sure they know that they are loved, that he’s still there. That they still have each other. It doesn’t feel like enough, but maybe it never will be, because there will always be a hole in all of their lives where Rose should be.

**_three..._ **

Some nights none of them can sleep. Julie and Carlos will drag out bedtime, or he’ll find the lights still on in their rooms when he comes up to bed, or there will be a quiet knock on his door and he’ll find one of his kids standing outside teary-eyed and clutching a pillow after a bad dream.

Those nights, the three of them pile into the car, still in their pajamas sometimes, and just drive. L.A. traffic is better at night, and the bright lights flashing by in the dark seem to belong to another world. They go out to Griffith Park or the beach; sometimes they turn on some music, or listen to an audiobook. And it aches, because the books are stories they were listening to with Rose and never finished, and if Rose were here, they’d all be singing along to the songs - Julie and Rose harmonising while Ray hummed off-tune and Carlos did his best, and the trip would turn into a fun late-night adventure with ice cream and laughter.

They still stop for ice cream. Carlos always perks up at the suggestion of McDonald’s, no matter how tired he looks when they start out, and it’s a good way of making sure all three of them get something to eat. Julie and Carlos share fries dipped in soft serve in the backseat and argue over whether to add ketchup to the mix, and it feels like a fragile kind of okay.

Ray’s favourite nights are when they go to the beach. They walk barefoot along the water’s edge, holding hands, with Ray in the middle. The warm darkness smells like salt and seaweed. The ocean roars in the distance, unfathomable water vanishing into the night, and everything feels so immense, but their little knot of the three of them is an anchor point, keeping Ray grounded when he feels like he might float away into that tide.

**_four times…_ **

They’re coping better these days, he thinks. The house is still too quiet, but they’ve gotten used to it, and between Julie and Flynn and Carlos, there’s more laughter again. Not much music, though, and none from Julie. A year or two ago, Ray would have laughed at the thought that he might miss her endless piano scales, but now he’d give anything to hear her play again. She used to live for music, her and Rose both, and seeing that part of her still frozen over with grief never stops aching. He knows how happy it used to make her, and the fact that music means grief for her now breaks his heart. The concerned emails from Ms. Harrison keep coming, and he worries.

Carlos is doing better than this time last year, if a little quieter. But Julie still has days she can’t leave her room. They both know that a schedule is important, but those days, Ray takes in Julie’s tear-stained face and can’t make her face the world. But she manages to keep up with her work; her grades have gotten better again.

He’s so proud of both of them - they’ve come so far. 

Maybe this is something that won’t heal. Some things just don’t. He doesn’t know.

**_that I’ll try for one more night_ **

Ray has bad days too, where it feels like getting out of bed is the hardest thing in the world, let alone going to work and making sure there’s food on the table and they all have clean clothes to wear. Sometimes he has to pull over on the freeway because a song Rose used to sing came on the radio and he suddenly can’t see through his tears. 

But the light has slowly come back into the house. It’s in Carlos’s sweet mischievous smiles, in the love Victoria pours into every meal she brings over, in Julie’s small smiles and slowly recovering energy.

He sees Rose in both of his children, and it aches. They have her dark curls, the tilt of her nose, the spark of mischief. Julie has her graceful hands, her long pianist’s fingers. Carlos’s words still have a little trace of Rose’s accent at times. Rose is still such a strong presence in their house, and Ray can’t turn around without seeing the ghost of her somewhere. But these days, it feels like a gift. It’s stopped hurting as much, and now it just feels like her love is lingering, even if she couldn’t stay with them.

**_keep holding on, never look back_ **

The dark pink dahlia on Julie’s keyboard is the first thing that catches Ray’s eye, and then he looks up at his daughter’s face, and it’s hard to tell from this distance, but he thinks maybe she’s been crying. But she looks happy, too, and her words ring out clearly across the room, people hanging on every word, Ray included.

He’s not sure if it sounds more like a goodbye or a thank you.

And then Julie begins to sing, amber light falling onto her like a rain of stars, and Ray’s heart clenches because he recognises the song. He didn’t know if he’d ever hear it finished. Julie’s band doesn’t show up when he’d expect them to, and he’s not sure what’s going on, but he’s hanging on Julie’s every note as she keeps singing, his brave girl belting out Rose’s words and hitting every note true, and then her Phantoms  _ do _ come in, and the rest of the song is pure triumphant joy, Julie dancing like he hasn’t seen her do since before Rose’s death. There are tears spilling down Ray’s face, and he can’t take his eyes off his daughter. 

_ And it’s one, two, three, four times / that I’ll try for one more night _

He’d held onto that line so many times in the last year, and it had kept him going. Trying for one more night, for Rose, for Carlos, for Julie. And maybe all three of them have learned how to live again, not just survive till the next day.

The song ends - too soon, in Ray’s opinion - and their set is apparently over, and Julie’s bandmates vanish. Ray would rather leave and have a quiet moment with his family than stay for the main band, but Carlos wants to hear Panic! at the Disco, and pretty soon Julie slips in to join them, back in her regular clothes. And while the rest of the concert can’t match up to the opening act by any stretch, Ray does find himself enjoying it.

They sing all the way home, and they’re still riding the high when they get to the front door and are talking in the garden. Julie tells him she’s thanked the boys for getting her back into music - “but I haven’t thanked you, Papi,” and Ray can’t help the small, surprised feeling before he smiles back at his daughter. 

Because so many times in the last year he’s felt utterly inadequate to help his children, and especially Julie, with the darkness they’ve all faced. He’s spent nights lying awake, struggling with his own grief and feeling helpless to get them through it. And sometimes it feels like all he can do is just make sure he’s there and he’s listening, and sometimes all he can do is hold them.

He glances at the dahlia Carlos is still holding. Yes, maybe Ray has been able to be there for them, but it still feels like Rose is here too, helping them all. In flowers showing up unexpectedly, in fading sticky notes and songs. That thought keeps him smiling softly after Julie’s hugged him and run off to the studio, and he and Carlos head inside.

Ray trims the dahlia carefully, puts it in a vase of fresh water. He calls out a goodnight to Carlos, who’s heading upstairs, and thinks about setting out breakfast for tomorrow. He finds himself humming again.

It’s been a hard year - the hardest - but he thinks they’re going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in a series of prompts from JATP Appreciation Week on tumblr, so check them out! Hopefully I'll get a couple more of these written this week.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr here.


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